PRESS STATEMENT. (18TH AUGUST, 2025).S
SETING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: It Was President Tinubu That Breathes Life Into Ila College Of Education
– Osun APC Counters Board Chair, Provost
The Osun State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has slammed the Governing Council and management of the state College of Education, Ila-Orangun, for arrogating to themselves the services they did not render to the institution.
It would be recalled that the chairman of the college’s governing council and Provost of the college, Dr Lasisi Jimoh and Alhaji Akinleye Sarafadeen had respectively commended Governor Ademola Adeleke’s administration ‘for breathing new life into the institution after years of neglect and near collapse under the previous APC administration’ while hosting newsmen on the campus last week.
The governing council chairman went further to state that ‘during the APC era, the college was destabilised with key assets like the water factory and cashew farm handed out for peanut’.
The Provost of the college too had earlier disclosed that the key projects completed since January 2024 included 1,000-seater auditorium named after the governor; a new office complex for the school of social sciences; a brand new tractor; a Hilux van and two hybrid Toyota Corolla cars.
A fact-check on the projects showed that the 1,000-seater auditorium and the new office complex for the school of social sciences are both funded by TETFUND and I-IMPACT.
Discerning minds would have expected the Provost and the chairman of the governing council to lay on the table how much of the Internally Generated Revenue their tenure has made for the school instead of telling bare-faced lies of having bailed out the school from their purported collapse to revival.
It is uncharitable of both Akinleye and Jimoh to have summarily stated that it was Governor Adeleke that put life into the institution when it was known to all and sundry that it was President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who empowered the school with N2 billion both TETFUND and I-IMPACT fund just as it was the plight of other five colleges of education, six polytechnics and six universities across the country.
Must Dr Jimoh, the Provost of the college who was once disengaged as a lecturer by the administration of former Governor Rauf Aregbesola but magnanimously reabsorbed by ex-Governor Gboyega Oyetola resorted to the running of the diarrhoea of the mouth having lost a house of assembly election under the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP)?
It is high time the board and management of the Osun State College of Education, Ila-Orangun, learnt how to separate the Federal Government support from that of the state government which has contributed nothing in the case of the Osun State.
It is disheartening and heartbreaking that the board and management of a higher institution which is yet to pay all the outstanding peculiar allowances of both its academic and management staff could be talking of the PDP-led state government bringing life into the school.
Alhaji Akinleye and Dr Jimoh should not allow political sentiment to blindfold their senses of reasoning when they are showering unmerited accolades on their principal who has copiously proved through his actions and inactions in the office that education is far from the priority of his administration.
The fact of the development is that it was the APC governments that brought the life line which the board and management of the school are dubiously flaunting to the Osun State College of Education.
e-SIGNED:
*Mogaji KOLA OLABISI, Osun State APC Director of Media and Information.*
